Sgt Hulka Uncut

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Archive for category Evil Motherfuckers

Democracy In Montana

Oct 19

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Evil Motherfuckers, Good Ideas, Politics | Comments off

Now you all know I lay heaps of shit on the USA, and in particular the hillbillies that can come from the place I grew up. But there are pockets of resistance even in a seriously “Red” state that Trump won by a significant margin in 2016.

They have this tradition in the western USA of universities of making signs out of white rocks on the mountainsides to advertise say an “L” for Loyola University or a big “M” for the University of Montana.

So, see what some inventive folks have done to welcome Trump to a campaign rally in Missoula today.
image001
Screen Shot 2018-10-19 at 11.32.33 am

Hmmm, maybe I was on to something . . .

Dec 14

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Evil Motherfuckers, Other Topics | Comments off

Because with even USA Today after you, clearly the word for you is repulsive. #repulsive

The word you are looking for is ‘repulsive’

Oct 8

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Evil Motherfuckers, Other Topics, Politics | Comments off

So, finally we may have reached the point where Trump will lose significant support and endorsements for using language that was so vulgar and mysogynistic that even stalwart supporters reacted negatively. I believe that there will be a significant number of wives and girlfriends of white supremacists that will secretly vote for Hillary. Plenty of his core white male support will also have wives, daughters or mothers that could be the target of behaviour like that displayed by Donald Trump, and will also be repulsed by it.

I actually reckon that his campaign had jumped the shark last week when people started leaving his event about half way through the 40 minute rant after he was 80 minutes late. But hopefully this latest revelation is the end of him in this election. The racism, sexism, and bigotry to virtually every constituency I can think of already displayed didn’t seem to do it. Nor has the documented evidence of his poor business skills or the proclivity he has displayed to defraud anyone he encounters in business.

But his final failure is clearly the fact that he is a pathological liar. That’s right, a liar so complete that he believes his own lies and is deluded enough to think that audio, video or written records will somehow disappear, or can be explained away as some conspiracy theory.

Spy magazine clearly nailed it when they dubbed him a short fingered vulgarian in the ’80s.

Woah there big fella!

Feb 14

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Bad Ideas, Economics, Evil Motherfuckers, International, Other Topics | Comments off

OK, in an otherwise excellent post about the out of touchness of CEOs, Vyan goes way too far by saying:

“As a matter of fact most Investment people like Perkins, Zell or even Mitt Romney don’t actually do any real “work” at all, because their Money Does their Work For Them in the form of gaining interest and paying dividends.”

This is kinda bullshit. As a Director and company owner, I worked my way up from the bottom of a business I built myself with no outside investors gifting me anything, or inheriting the whole show. As a result of that, I also have a significant retirement investment account I manage myself and do quite well at, thank you. But if you think for a second that all the research, analysis and planning that I do to make sure I meet or exceed the markets I invest in isn’t work, then fuck you. If you think I shouldn’t use the advantage I have in intelligence, patience and opportunity to make the most of my time, money and ideas, then once again, fuck you. If I am smarter than you and as a result have a better job and am on the way to financial independence and you don’t like it, {ahem} well, you know the drill. It’s ok, I don’t need to be loved by all, but I bet I will be included in many people’s zombie plans, so I sleep OK.

What you should be focusing on is whether the whole package of labour, capital and ideas I am putting into a business and assess whether I am duly compensated for that. A good basis has always as a multiplier of the CEO salaries in comparison with the average worker salary. Way back after WWII it used to be in the 40s. When Ronnie the Raygun took office in the USA, it was 78. Its over 4000 today. Hmmmmmm, but what does the peak CEO do for the world? Isn’t he responsible for making the whole economy work, keeping liquidity maintained and other superhero type shit like that? well, fuck no obviously.

The same guys that inflate the big bubbles in the economy, overheat them with outright fraud and then watch as the fuckers explode while counting their fees based on the transaction, not the OUTCOME of the transaction, get 4000 times the average worker in their companies. And I understand that Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman’s actually spends the large amount of any given week wandering around the house in his undies eating chips, drinking beer and playing whatever Call of Duty is currently hot. And hey, I got no problem with that. You are basically describing my perfect weekend several times a year. But it ain’t worth 4000 times, is all I’m saying.

There’s a revolution coming, and things have gotten so out of balance in the balance between the return on money, ideas and labour in the world, that when it does occur, it’s going to be quite a shock to some, if the balance is corrected.

Cull The Beasts!

Jan 31

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Bad Ideas, Evil Motherfuckers, Science | Comments off

So, I’ve had a serious look at the shark cull issue, and want to add some analysis as a longer term lover of killing and eating beasts of all sizes. There is what appears to be an OK summary of the facts on The New Daily, and you can read them all for yourself and decide.

I wanted to read some more, as I was not convinced either way, and I want to avoid being biased, so I am going to need to see the estimates of the actual fall in $ from tourism directly attributable with Australia being seen as “dangerous” and then pull out of that body of danger that would surely include spiders, snakes, jellyfish, crocs and plants that are dangerous in this broad red land, and try to come up with something exceeding the $22 million anual cost estimate in the articles “for’ case.

And then I need to be able to answer the question, when exactly did tourists become fearful homebodies, and not see dangerous as a draw card?

I think it might be suss to spend $22 million for a reduction of 1 person killed per year so we can return to our normal rate of humans killed by sharks. Even if we could prove that what we proposed would do what we want it to. And the case for that is not good {cough, cough, by-catch, cough}

However, the facts on the side of which species are threatened and endangered are pretty solid. Here’s the “red list” details you might be familiar with from the IUCN, based on shitloads of peer reviewed evidence collection from scientists. Yeah, I know, those fucking scientists and the UN again. It’s like living with your mom, reading me regularly isn’t it?

So after examining the data, basically it’s easier to count the number of non-threatened species than threatened or endangered ones. For the common man, put it this way: you see a shark, I pretty much guarantee it’s either harmless and overfished to decimation by someone, or has lost or is losing habitat to the point that it is being killed out from fear and complacency and numbers are dwindling. Trust me, just about the last thing you want to be in this world is kinda slow, basically harmless, and look like a shark.

The sum of Colin Barnett’s current argument is that Australia is being seen as too dangerous and is losing more than $22 million a year due to fear of surfing at one south coast surf spot, and he has a constituency there that has raised it as a big deal to him. Well, I got news for you folks down south. There are a bazillion good surf beaches on this tropical island continent of ours. If yours just happens to be currently or permanently experiencing a high concentration of sharks where you like the curl, too fucking bad. Basically, you are saying that your right to surf right there trumps the right of another species to exist. And I am not being theatric. Lets say there were only 3700 humans left in the world. That’s the number of Great Whites estimated to be swimming around in the pool that covers 66% of the planet’s surface.

Now, I know humans are fucking scary, but if there were only that few, I’d be doing everything I could to save them. They are a peak predator and they are an indicator species for the health of the ecosystem. Honestly, this is just like the controversy I have run into everywhere I’ve lived. Doesn’t the grizzly bear, mountain lion, grey wolf, shark, tiger, black rhino and every other fucking scary peak predator, or even those just holding up their part of the food chain, deserve enough space just to survive? Do we demand, as humans, access to all the space in the world, anytime that it suits us to a point where we drive other species to extinction? We are one bleak fucking species if that’s the case.

But there is an alternative, you know, If government feels that the ‘do nothing’ case is not strong enough and is compelled to fuck with something.

If you want to go all ultra-protectionist and remove the dangerous killer from the water, outlaw swimming and surfing.

Ever Feel Like A Mechanic . . .

Sep 20

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Bad Ideas, Economics, Evil Motherfuckers, International | Comments off

Reading the news this morning from the USA, “… House passes $40 billion cut to the food stamp program over the next 10 years”, and having seen the recent news from only a couple of days ago that was analysed across the business media across the political spectrum of perspectives, as represented in the following graph leads me to that position I am in occasionally with a client, where I end up saying, “See, now here’s your problem right here”

Productivity

Now, when I read that graph I arrived at what I believe to be an obvious conclusion. Clearly, however, many of the supposed experts who examined the same data arrived the conclusion: “Yes, that was pretty effective. Now what we want to do is make sure that the poor fuckers who have gained nothing for their input in increased productivity over the last 40 years now can’t even have the pittance that has been provided food assistance to keep them going when we heap out largess to the farming industry every few years. That’s the way you balance a budget.”

Really, at this point I don’t see how any other objective conclusion could be reached other than that this is one big natural experiment in psychohistory with the following thesis: How far can you push a (lower) middle class before they actually do start rioting in the streets and stringing up bankers they can find when they loot lower Manhattan?

I mean fucking honestly. There is no one I could find disputing the data in the graph above as I have been reading about the update in the research that I first read a year ago. Sure the WSJ puts quite a different spin on it than does The Nation, but neither dispute the facts. The middle class has lost any gains due to productivity for 40 years so that those supplying capital and those that run the major companies in the world can enrich themselves vastly. And, unless there is some significant outcry and political movement in the near future, the US may actually be at the point in society where they will let the poor and working poor starve (and freeze) to death. Fuck em, right? They won’t riot, they’ll be too hungry and tired from working their two fast food jobs. And fuck the new indentured class too – those students that thought they would get a leg up by borrowing to go to uni and instead found their aren’t any jobs in their field or anything similar, and they aren’t allowed to go bankrupt so they can just fight for a couple of those Walmart jobs themselves for 30 years to pay off their debt.

What will it take until someone says directly to the power, “See what you got here is a problem with your minimum wage. Unless you raise your minimum wage, you aren’t going to reduce the need for food stamps. And if you don’t raise that minimum to something like a living wage, your middle class (that drives 70% of GDP growth) is going to disappear.”

You might also want to consider the motivation and interest in continuing to participate in a civil society for folks in the middle and lower end of the spectrum. What would motivate someone to work a job at Taco Bell and a job at 7-11 for a grinding ability to just stay out of poverty their whole life as opposed to something illegal, when clearly those who are too big to jail would call it foolish.

Then consider how there always seems to be this exasperated search for motive when someone brings a shotgun into the office. I wonder if a society so steeped in inequity and so desperate to maintain access to guns doesn’t realise how close it is to an MO for a mass murder on a daily basis. Sure, you could say that all these people are random crazies, but then they aren’t covered for mental health care or even institutionalisation since Reagan’s time either. You are just getting used to how bad things have gotten for the majority, how disconnected ‘leaders’ are from subjects, and only lack a spark to set a lot on fire.

We need to have a chat about Syria

Aug 29

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Bad Ideas, Evil Motherfuckers, International, Other Topics, Politics | Comments off

Hey, I was downtown at the Senate Forum last night, but didn’t get to share my view on what action we should take in Syria to counter the abominable response by the worst candidate I have met for election to the Senate this cycle, Sue Lines (LAB).

See, the Labor government is now ready to rush to support military intervention in Syria, and Sue attempted to pull our heart strings with ‘I am not sure the children of Syria can wait for the UN or the Australian Parliament to deliberate’.

Once again, a government with no real answers is ready to dance to the tune of the US or Britain with respect to military strikes that will do more damage, be indiscriminate in their effect (surgical strikes, my arse). Like the Coalition before them, then aren’t willing to do the hard work for years, then rush to some populist travesty in order to prove they are doing something.

Now I care as much about human beings as the the next guy, but we didn’t get here in a couple months in Syria, lots of people are already dead or dying, and unfortunately many more are to come, regardless if military action is taken now or not. If you want to do something about genocide, you need to support a change in the definition of the term by the UN, and to put fast action triggers in the UN plan for addressing it when it raises its ugly head. Addressing issues like this with violence in the short term is virtually never effective, doesn’t really save that many lives in the overall scheme of things, and leads to problems of regime change and occupation (who do you support amongst the dozens of rebel groups? Sunni, Shia, Alawite, Druze, Christian, etc?). You can only grow a representative democracy, not impose it, and this is a country that has had more than 40 years of dictatorship, since Assad’s old man Hafez used to compete with the Shah over the title of Most Evil Motherfucker on the Planet.

You want real short term action. How about the NSA using its powers for good instead of evil for a change? How about the NSA publish all it knows on Syria in as transparent a fashion as possible, and keep at it worldwide through all its available propaganda organs? Frankly, that will scare the shit out of all of us, including the Assad regime if they know that they will get no safe harbour anywhere unless they immediately surrender to the International Court of Justice. We can also continue to press the General Council and the Security Council to take joint action as and when we can get it through. Prepare for humanitarian assistance to refugees in neighbouring countries, and do what we can to ameliorate the worst of the negative effects.

That’s reality, and what we should be pursuing.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not a complete pacifist wuss, and I have a long history here of appropriate use of the dogs of war, but we ain’t there yet.

Even Paul Krugman misses the point

Jun 11

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Bad Ideas, Economics, Evil Motherfuckers, Good Ideas, International | Comments off

Memo to America, but with lessons for lots of people everywhere. How to kick start your way out of a liquidity trap, by focusing on a root cause. First a definition from Krugman from his very good article on Japan this morning: Liquidity Trap

“But all of this is totally irrelevant to our current situation, where inflation is running below target, the target is too low anyway, and the reason we have mass unemployment is that there just isn’t enough demand, and hence there just aren’t enough jobs, no matter how desperately people search for them.”

But he should finish the point and say why the economy could fail in the manner that it did, and stopped where it did to begin the great recession: the rich took all the fucking money! Or at least they took enough of it already that they caused the liquidity problem that the middle class has right now, which is why that 70% of the economy is not driving the production that keeps all the yanks (and plenty of others) in jobs with ever spiralling wage rises (hopefully based on productivity gains, but that is another story).

See, I’m not a Nobel prize winning economist, or even in the profession by training, but I can still see the whole system of an economy linked together in a synchronistic way. One man’s debt is another man’s credit and all that. Have a good read of Matt Taibbi and Michael Lewis on the con that was perpetrated, and still is going on, but here’s my take on the cause and effect. The rich (banks in particular) tricked the middle class in America into getting in over their head with debt in often a fraudulent manner (I’m look right at you Countrywide) and lot’s of common people did not have enough sense to realise the risk. And the rich took the middle class for their last dollar in debt because remember the context; this is after the slow fall since about 1979 in wage gains by people making a wage. Almost all productivity gains in those decades went to the suppliers of capital to the equation (and not labour or true innovation), and resulted in a significant increase in the concentration of wealth at the top. Look it up, that is published economic fact. So the middle class buying power has been falling for decades, and they supported the demand they were creating artificially with household debt. Then the trigger point and the house of cards all falls in, and even giants like AIG are proven to be fools and criminals (yet strangely enough, none go to jail).

Now the rich will make a show of how fraud was insignificant (or lie, in common language), and how there is just cause for the gains made in the 1%, but that is just maskirovka; the real gains were made in the 1% of the 1% (or 0.1%). And in that club, for every Steve Jobs, I will show you 10 Gina Reinhart’s, greedy opportunists that turned a whopping great big fortune into an immensely whopping great fortune through no real skill or innovation of their own. Parasites that then even turn on their children and deny them their probabilistic right to the spoils that they also did not earn.

But I don’t want to get off on a rant here, and back to my point. With the middle class in (now bad) debt up to their eyeballs, low and falling wages relative to their productivity input, and no one who will loan them any more money for a hand up to get something started even if they were entrepreneurial, where the fuck is aggregate demand going to come from to move the economy along? The 70% ain’t got it, and the 0.1% ain’t spending it. That’s your cause, and your trigger point for the GFC. But it also suggests the solution to get things moving again. Find a way to get some money back into the hands of the people who actually buy the vast amount of goods and services in the economy in the short term (and then we will get to countering over concentration of wealth in the mid term).

Wouldn’t you think that at times like these, when the US government can borrow any vast sum of money it wants without raising interest rates from basically 0%, that it might make a good plan for the government to do major maintenance on its infrastructure? Note here, I am not talking build a lot of pork barrel shit that doesn’t go anywhere, but why not fill some of the pot holes near the CBD of some major cities that you could drive a VW into, or I don’t know, upgrade your electricity transmission network and solve your greenhouse gas problem at the same time. Do some thinking on it, and you will come up with of a number of decent ideas for shovel ready projects to improve productivity, reliability and innovation of US infrastructure.

Otherwise, you can do the alternate plan: go beg those like Gina to buy more jewel encrusted golden backscratchers and hope that form of is demand enough to base a modern economy on.

Transplant is likely a misnomer

Mar 26

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Evil Motherfuckers, International, Politics | Comments off

I understand that Dick Cheney’s operation has opened up the debate about whether he got special treatment or moved up the donors list.

I can tell you that while he may have used influence to get the kids heart (probably with lots of his blood while you are there), he certainly deserved it more than most on the list because he didn’t have one to begin with.

There’s a difference between cunning and intellegence

Mar 21

Posted by Sgt Hulka in Climate Change, Economics, Evil Motherfuckers, Other Topics, Science | Comments off

So, the Minerals Rent Tax has made it through the Senate and will become law on 1 July 2012, delivering a 30% tax on the wealth dug out of OUR ground by a few to make THEM bazillions. And despite the likely legal challenges from Twiggy on a constitutional basis that are unlikely to hold water {cough cough, petroleum rent tax at 40%}, the law is likely to hold. And fair enough. There is certainly nothing wrong with all of Australia sharing in the wealth of minerals we all own, and nothing unfair in taxation that is drawn from wealth that is currently being generated in Western Australia versus the more populous eastern states. Remember that it was only up until the very recent past that Western Australia wasn’t supported annually through sharing wealth of the east over here. You didn’t hear anything about unfairness of taxation from the sand-gropers when their schools and roads were all being subsidised by the folks out east. Remember, we may need them again when the boom goes bust, because the GDP in Australia is still primarily generated in NSW and VIC, despite the current mining boom (ref. Wikipedia)

Screen shot 2012-03-21 at 7.51.25 AM

But so as not to miss out on the news cycle that reported the Minerals Rent Tax, one of the current new developments that he is not suing anyone over, Clive Palmer instead waded into the conspiracy theory market, accusing Greenpeace of being funded by the CIA to undermine Australian coal exports. He’s already backing off the statements made, as he is demonstrably full of shit, but I bet the retractions don’t make the national radio and TV like the first assertions did. Funny that.

Now if Clive was really worried about a conspiracy of foreigners trying to shape the debate here in Australia, he would watch a bit of Media Watch and then look into the funding of the fluffy sounding Australian Environment Foundation, and Australian Climate Science Coalition. What he would see is that virtually all the funding coming from German and US agrichemical companies and the American Climate Science Coalition. The AEF and CSC promote views that are based on climate change denial from the US and have an agenda on the Murray Darling Basin that are not in the public interest as much as they are in the interest of the agrichemicals industry. Also very funny that.

Pity none of the networks that take statements from the AEF point out these connections when they are basically reading off the AEF’s media releases to meet their story deadlines, or that Clive isn’t railing on the TV about them.

Now I acknowledge that a lot of these super rich mining magnates got there by their own skill and hard work, but an equal number got there by coming from a life of privilege, their connections and inheritance, or simply making a big pile of money a huge pile of money by turning the handle on machine already invented for them.

That’s cunning, not intelligence. So the next time you are at something that Clive is presenting at, feel free to call him out on his bullshit, as you are more likely than not to win the argument. He has all the intellectual depth of a carpark puddle, and is possibly also going burko.